Tories thwart claims: lawyer Residential school students shocked

Tories thwart claims: lawyer

 

Residential school students shocked

 

BY COLIN PERKEL, THE CANADIAN PRESS JULY 12, 2013

 

 

The federal government is thwarting compensation attempts from students at a former Indian residential school who say they were victims of horrific child abuse, including some jolted in an electric chair, advocates say.

They accuse the government of hiding thousands of pages of documentary evidence - much of it from a criminal investigation of St. Anne's residential school in Northern Ontario - that might support their claims.

"The federal government is turning its head and doing everything it can to keep the abuse from being uncovered," said Fay Brunning, an Ottawa-based lawyer who acts for some of the claimants.

From 1904 to 1976, hundreds of aboriginal children from remote James Bay communities were sent to St. Anne's, one of 140 church-run residential schools in Canada set up to "civilize" First Nations.

Ontario Provincial Police Det. Const. Greg Delguidice led a five-year investigation in the 1990s of abuse at the school. According to a statement Delguidice gave this year as part of ongoing civil proceedings, students complained they had been whipped, kicked and beaten.

Boys and girls said they were raped or otherwise sexually abused. Children said they were made to eat their own vomit. His investigation also turned up evidence of an electric chair made by a supervisor, he said. Victims said they were made to sit on the metal-framed chair with its plywood seat and wires leading to a black box. A supervisor would crank a handle, jolting the bodies.

"The small boys used to have their legs flying in front of them," said Edmund Metatawabin, 65, who said he was twice put in the chair as a seven-year-old in the mid-1950s. "The sight of a child being electrocuted and their legs waving in front of them was a funny sight for the missionaries and they'd all be laughing." The girls would be strapped to the chair and jolted harder for punishment, Metatawabin said.

"Some of them passed out."